Lupica
Shooting From the Lip
We come to the head of the stretch for the football season around here with people actually having a debate about Tommy DeVito or Tyrod Taylor for the Giants. The Jets? They actually had to debate for more than five minutes about putting anybody except Tim Boyle and Trevor Siemian out there to run an offense that has been negligently put together and negligently managed by everyone involved with it since Aaron Rodgers, the de facto general manager of the team, got hurt.
So these are our December quarterbacks: DeVito and Taylor. Wilson and Siemian, now that Boyle has been mercifully released. And always there is Rodgers, whose season has been Tuesdays with Pat McAfee and not football Fridays and Sundays and Mondays with the Jets. Before long, Jets fans will be looking back at Joe Flacco’s time here as the good old days.
And what this ought to do, when we take a hard look – really hard – at the way the position is currently being played with both the Giants and Jets, is appreciate what the Giants had with Eli Manning, as good as we ever had at quarterback for a New York team, and that includes the sainted Joe Namath.
Phil Simms, who was pretty damn great himself, was unlucky the season the Giants won their second Super Bowl, and so it was Jeff Hostetler under center when the Giants beat the Bills in Tampa. It is why there is still only one New York quarterback who won twice, and that is No. 10, who came to the Giants from Ole Miss the same as Chuckin’ Charlie Conerly once did.
On top of all that, Eli once started 210 games in a row. Think about that in the season when there is nearly a full roster of players who have played quarterback in the NFL; when Rodgers went down for the count and so did Joe Burrow and you thought the same had happened with Trevor Lawrence the other night.
It was different with Peyton Manning’s kid brother and Archie’s kid: He was there for you, week after week and year after year, when the Giants were great and when they weren’t any good at all. He only had those two playoff runs, when he took the Giants all the way, and other than those two runs neither he and Tom Coughlin, when they were together, didn’t win a playoff game.
Plaxico Burress went into a crowded club one night carrying a loaded gun in his pants like an idiot, and shot himself in the leg, and shot the Giants right out of their chance to win two Super Bowls in a year, in a season when they had started out 10-1. Yeah, we all know that Eli’s lifetime record is only .500 and his last three seasons, when he had nothing in front of him and hardly anything to work with, weren’t anything to write home to Archie and Olivia about.
And yet: At a time when we question the judgment of Jets general manager Joe Douglas for taking Zach Wilson once with the No. 2 overall pick in the draft, you always go back to when Ernie Accorsi essentially drafted Eli with the first pick, because of the Draft Day trade he made with the Chargers. After that, Eli became everything Accorsi thought he could be and Giants fans everywhere could have dreamed he would be. And when the money was on the table – twice – with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady and the Patriots, once when the Patriots went into the Super Bowl at 18-0, Eli delivered both times.
In maybe the biggest moment of that game in Glendale, Ariz., Eli was as tough as he had ever been, just because he had to be. Richard Seymour should have been able to put him on the ground, except that Eli refused to go to the ground, got away, and threw that crazy pass that David Tyree pinned to his helmet. Was that part of it luck? Sure. But there was no luck that Eli was still on his feet when it was time to make that throw.
Then later, in the second Giants-Patriots Super Bowl in Indianapolis, it was Eli standing in the shadow of his own goalposts and throwing as beautiful a deep ball as any Super Bowl has ever seen to Mario Manningham, and the Giants were going to beat the Patriots again. You know who didn’t win the game for his team that day? Brady didn’t.
You go ahead and pick your own Mt. Rushmore of the greatest Giants of them all. Here is mine, and this comes from somebody who was, well, a giant Phil Simms fan:
Lawrence Taylor, Michael Strahan, Frank Gifford, Eli Manning.
There is still all this debate about Eli’s Hall of Fame credentials, despite the two Super Bowls, despite all those consecutive games, despite more passing yards and touchdown passes than anybody in Giants history. There is no debate. He should go straight to Canton when they finally vote on him a year from this February. Joe Namath, for all of the flash of his early career, is in the Hall with more career interceptions than touchdowns; is really in Canton because he won his one Super Bowl, Super Bowl III, against the Colts when the Jets were 18-point underdogs.
He made it to Canton. So did Y.A. Tittle. So did Fran Tarkenton, who would play five seasons for the Giants, sandwiched in between the 13 he played for the Vikings. Tittle came from San Francisco. Namath would go play one season for the Rams after he left the Jets. Eli never went anywhere. Eli was there for the Giants from the time Ernie traded for him until he finally sat down for good in 2019, when Daniel Jones was a rookie.
The only reason his consecutive game streak finally ended was because Ben McAdoo, whoever he was, finally sat him down for Geno Smith. McAdoo gave Eli the chance to start that game, so he could keep his streak of starts going. Eli was too proud and too honorable and too much a Manning to accept an offer like that.
I asked Eli on Friday if, other than the two Lombardi Trophies his Giants won, if there was anything he did in the NFL that gave him more pride than those 210 consecutive starts.
“Probably not,” he said. “I wanted to be accountable.”
“Eli always showed up,” his dad Archie said about an hour later. “And nobody ever loved being a Giant more than he did.”
He showed up, across all the football weekends and all the years, in Jersey and on the road, when you knew he would always give the Giants a chance, especially when he was in his prime. That is the way John Mara once put it, exactly:
“I always felt like we had a chance with No. 10.”
If the Giants had the young Eli now, they might very well be on their way to the playoffs. Same with the Jets. When you look at what those two teams have this weekend, remember just how good we had it when we had Eli Manning, who delivered in the big game as much as Namath did.
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